Just to provide a bit of a counterargument, people criticise him (and McCarthy) for not playing a forward pass but (a) he's almost certainly under strict instructions not to lose possession at all costs and (b) there's usually fuck all movement in front of him and he's probably under strict instructions not to pass to anyone that's marked.

Though in response to the original question, he's nowhere near good enough to run the centre of the pitch for us, particularly if the person next to him is someone utterly lacking in creativity like Gueye.

When you take stock of our squad, who do we really have that moves the ball forward effectively from deep?

Rooney? Baines? Davies? Keane? That's grim.

There's a real lack of care to how this squad was constructed. All of our players might be good in an absolute terms but they don't complement each other at all. There's room in the team for a safe ball-mover in defensive midfield but that player will look pretty bad if there's no one else to move it forward effectively.

Schneiderlin doesn't help his cause by hiding from the ball and generally looking off the pace. But a big part of the reason things feel so toxic is that it's near impossible to put out a functional eleven with this group of players.

And our recruitment team seems totally ignorant of the issues. We've gone for goalscorers when what we really need is midfielders, wingers, and full backs (i.e. anybody) who get us into the final third consistently. Walcott and Tosun might be good but they aren't fixing what's really broken.

We did need a goalscorer as well. Get all the midfielders and wingers you want but we're not mounting a top 4 challenge with DCL or Niasse leading the line.

When you're picking the ball up, putting your foot on it and completely slowing the game down you're going to have limited options in playing the ball forward.

That's what Barry was so good at. Picking it up from the centre half and releasing the ball quickly to the three infront of him.

Yeah true, I think that's more his limitation than him being a shithouse though. Just don't think he has the speed or vision of a Barry or Rooney to see that forward ball quickly enough to play someone in whilst they're still open.

Speaking to Sky Sports , he said: "Ronald Koeman pushed me very hard last season and I liked that. People can have opinions on the outside about Koeman and how things worked out with me but he did push and I enjoyed that.

"I probably worked harder myself when he was at Everton to keep improving, to improve everything, fitness, diet, defensive work, trying to get more goals, I was focused on everything.

"He had a belief that I could be much better than what I was showing. Obviously it didn't work out for him at Everton but he is a top coach."

I'm not actually disagreeing with you but the club still have someone to sell and have a duty to get as much as possible for him so they are right to big him up.Can you imagine the reaction if we publicly said he was crap and then tried to sell him?

That’s what Koeman did with Niasse.

Unsurprisingly we couldn’t flog him. And as it turns out he wasn’t even that shit.